Friday, February 1, 2013

Ken Wolman

SIGNS
AND PORTENTS: Sheng Xiao

Year of the Monkey I, February 23, 1944: A disquisition on male
ejaculation

Monkey
god born under the sign of General Zaius, or a zookeeper.

When
I was a child I thought as a child, and we laughed ourselves to
near-vomiting by going to the Bronx Zoo monkey house to watch the
apes jerking off, on their fur, on their food, on each other. Protein
is a basic survival tool.

According
to Anthony Burgess' version of the execution of Dr. Rodrigo Lopez,
the Queen's previously Jewish physician, the Portingale, sentenced to
drawing and quartering, did not get beyond the drop which alone
killed him, and like Joyce's Croppy Boy, blew his load when his
vertebrae snapped at the drop. The hangman probably was docked 10
pence for his miscalculation. The anomaly of what is moral: parents
who thought nothing of bringing their children to witness a traitor's
prolonged death at Tyburn whilst held in screaming agony ("See
what shall sure befall thee if thou eatest not thy spinach?"),
but covered their kids' eyes when Lopez spurted like a fire hose and
died on the spot. Later, his housemaid would confess without even the
threat to see any instruments but Lopez' that Dr. Rodrigo was a basic
lustbunny and could do her like a studhorse and keep enough left over
to extinguish small kitchen fires. Ah, those oversexed Hebraics who
want to doodle a Christian girl!

What
did his prowess get him?

Monkey II: October 22, 1944

Choosing
a Wife

You
ought never marry your familiar, especially if you like to fake
Chinese astrological signs. We never asked each other "Yo, babe,
what's your sign," but we found out soon enough: Mendoza's guts
torn from him post-mortuis
to gratify the pissed-off crowd, the executioner sliding around in
the Portuguese Jew's semen and guts arrayed like an evacuated bowel.
Our marriage: the melding of seed turned to bitterness and the odor
of a butcher-shop. Like Uncle Ezra said, "Wrong from the start."
He also wrote "Make it new" but was full of shit because
there is nothing new but clean underwear.

Monkey III: Monkeys like practical jokes

I
made two normal children in the womb of the woman I used to love. I
should have been Quasimodo. Did anyone, after watching Laughton in
The
Hunchback,
ever wonder at the star that presided over his making, what thwarted
critters could have coupled under the sewer grate to make this thing
of fear and hellish vision?

We
never go beyond the Face and the hump. We never hear the gorgeous
music behind Rigoletto's jester's humpback. We want our women to look
like Angelina Jolie or Penelope Cruz. As the Chinese man said when
his wife birthed a white-sembling baby, "Sum Ting Wong."

Monkey
IV: Monkeys like being healthy

Believing
that being sick is a waste of a valuable day,

Monkeys
very rarely feel ill. Their constantly active

lifestyles
are likely what helps Monkeys remain in good

health.
When Monkeys do become ill, such feelings are

generally
the result of feeling nervous.

Awaken
before visions can dispel. Sick of body or soul. I am aging and

my
joints ache. I am the Mass of complaints that concelebrate with my

demons.

Monkey
V: Career Advice

I
have had more jobs than times you've gotten laid. Quiz:
describe your last orgasm. I can describe my last job.

Monkeys
VI: Relationships

I
once skimmed a book about the bonobo, remarkably humanoid
chimpanzees, with a photo of two bonobos fucking. The male does not
take the female from behind: they assume the Missionary Position and
their faces are close enough to touch each other. Extrapolating from
the primatologist Frans de Waal, they would be very bad Catholics for
they use sex for affection and peacemaking, to settle a dispute, and
propagation is only a secondary concern. If a child is born of a
given union they may raise it or they may behave like some human
parents and destroy it as countless human parents have done, imitatio
Cronus,
setting aside he wasn't really human but was supposed to be a god.
Psychoanalytic tales tell of parents who, like Cronus, devour their
children from fear of the rival they have made, or from their horrid
realization that the child will be human and not a redemptive god.
That story worked in Christian Scripture, but never again. And so the
history of child generation is a history of abject and toxic failure
that leaves bones scattered about like this is a elephant's
graveyard.

Wood
Monkey, Years 1944 and 2044

The
Wood Monkey have exceptional communication skills that enable them to

interact
well with others. They are hard workers who have a keen

understanding
of the way things operate.

Caught
in a lie. I don't have a clue how anything operates. If I owned a
power drill I'd be able to set up a crucifixion assembly line but I
cannot operate the goddamn thing without be- coming my first victim. I
can't even lace a pair of sneakers for a morning run without catching
my fingers in the ties. I don't want to communicate with you unless
I'm being paid for it. Communication is a profession. I want to end
each discussion with "Good night and good luck" as though I
were Edward R. Murrow but I'm grateful I survived 45 years of
non-filtered cigaretttes. Why tempt fate?

2044. Who can think forward to age 100? No fond or mad wishes. I expect to be gone, asleep with cabbages and kings in a field.

Ken Wolman
is a retired technical writer and composition teacher who has lived in
New Jersey since 1976, except for almost three months in suburban
Philadelphia. He began writing poetry seriously in 1990 at age 46
because his voice was not available until then. Since then he's been
very fortunate, and has been awarded a New Jersey State Council on the
Arts poetry fellowship, plus a bunch of online and print publications in
venues from New Jersey to Tasmania.